Littttttttle babies!

And when I say little, I mean little. How much did you weigh when you were born? Personally I was 7lbs and 7oz, or in metric terms, about 3.4kg. The little babies I'm working with weigh anywhere from 600grams to 2.5kg or in other words...babies as small as 1.5 pounds.

These babies are all preterm babies, or born earlier than 38 weeks gestation. They may have been born early due to some sort of birth defect, an injury/event to the mother such as a car accident or such, been a high-risk pregnancy due to pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes, etc. These babies are almost always put directly on TPN and are slowly transitioned to enteral feedings, or tube feedings. I don't have too much to say, mostly because I think I'm still processing the long day and the time really seemed to fly.

This rotation requires daily homework that is assigned the day before. So every night I have a list of questions or calculation practice questions as well as 1-2 scientific articles to read. Today I got to the hospital around 7:15am and didn't leave until 6pm. YAY. I also have a daily lecture that covers a multitude of topics. Today covered the basics of prematurity as far as gastrointestinal issues, feeding guidelines, classifying "premature" vs "pre-term" vs "late term" and knowing birth weights and having to classify them by weight class and plotted percentiles.

All I know is that this week is crazy-busy. Not only do I have daily homework and readings, which I really don't mind, but I'm trying to prepare for my oral case study as well. It's on Wednesday and I have to plan on presenting, by myself, for about 45 minutes. Needless to say, I'm keeping this one short.